1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for calculating a checksum with inactive networking components in a computing system.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Modern computing systems include network adapters that enable the computing system to communicate with other computers. Some network cards have TCP/IP checksum offload engines that automatically compute the data's checksum on-the-fly. There are some drawbacks for those systems. One drawback is that the checksum is calculated prior to transmission. If a data bit flip occurs on the PCIe bus, the wrong data will get unknowingly transmitted and error detection will not occur. Another drawback is that there are configuration limits to network cards in certain modes, whereby checksum capability is disabled.